NEW YORK—With no starters returning from last season's national championship team, there always were going to be a lot of questions about Kentucky. It was surprising on Friday night to learn that one of those questions is when John Calipari will put in his full offense.

After the third-ranked Wildcats' 72-69 victory over Maryland to open the season, Calipari provided an honest assessment of his team's shortcomings on an individual and collective basis, noting where Kentucky must improve to get back to the top of the college basketball world by spring. It would behoove the Wildcats to have a response to a zone defense.

"We're not ready to play 40 minutes of basketball—we're just not ready," Calipari said after a game that demonstrated his point, with Kentucky squandering a 49-36 halftime lead before rallying down the stretch. "How about this? We don't have a press attack. Could you tell? We haven't put it in yet, haven't had time. (Maryland) went to the 1-3-1 zone. We don't have a zone offense in yet. I know you're looking at me, saying 'you're crazy.' Did you notice they didn't know what the hell to do?"

Nobody noticed, least of all Maryland coach Mark Turgeon, because Calipari yelled at forward Alex Poythress to run to the middle, and the 6-7 freshman complied, resulting in a dunk and the Terrapins abandoning their zone defense.

Kentucky's luck was not limited to Maryland's reversion to a man-to-man scheme. Despite 28 offensive rebounds, the Terps managed only 19 second-chance points, failure on the inside that was echoed on the outside with a 3-for-19 performance from 3-point range.

The Wildcats also might have been fortunate that Ryan Harrow spent most of the week battling the flu and was limited to 10 scoreless minutes. With Harrow ailing, walk-on Jarrod Polson got to play 22 minutes—only nine fewer than all of last season—and scored 10 points, more than the total for the first two years of his college career.

"He subbed at the table, I said, 'who's that?' " Turgeon said. "Because he hadn't played. I'd been hearing Cal talk about his point guard situation and should've known. He was the key to the game. Kid gave them confidence, and he made the play of the game."

That play was a strip of Pe'Shon Howard on a defensive rebound that Polson put right back up for a 67-63 Kentucky lead with 3:45 left. Polson's free throws in the closing minute provided the Wildcats' final points and enough of a margin to win the game as a desperation 3 banked wide.

It was not supposed to be Polson's show on Friday night. It was supposed to be Poythress, Nerlens Noel, Willie Cauley-Stein and Archie Goodwin -- the latest crop of hyper-talented freshmen to arrive in Lexington.

All showed flashes of brilliance, especially in Kentucky's dominant first half. But for every head-turning play the Wildcats made, there seemed to be a head-scratcher not far behind.

"It's a great learning opportunity," said Kyle Wiltjer, the sophomore forward who led Kentucky with 19 points and added six rebounds and three blocks. "We'll watch the film, and film doesn't lie. It'll show us all the things we need to work on. As Coach would say, we need to use this game, because it's early in the season, to just learn about our team. And hopefully we can learn from it and improve, because we still have a way to go to be a good basketball team."

That, in fact, was almost exactly what Calipari said a few minutes later. The coach also knows there is not a lot of time for his team to learn, not with a showdown with No. 8 Duke coming up Tuesday in Atlanta.

Then, there are the problems that might not be able to be fixed, the ones the Wildcats just have to hope will solve themselves.

"My concern is, we're not playing hard enough, we're stopping on possessions, we're not physically tough enough, and I don't know if I can do anything about that, other than go in games and see if they're gonna fight," Calipari said. "And the next game we play is Duke, on Tuesday. You're either gonna fight or you're gonna get beat."

The scary thing for the Wildcats was that they had to fight like crazy to beat Maryland after running up a big lead early. The scary thing for everyone else in the country was that Kentucky ran up that lead so easily, made the key plays at the key times to get the win and might have found another weapon in Polson in the process.